The Capitol Game

by Brian Haig

  “Two days?” Walters asked, pushing back his chair and clasping his hands behind his head. “Why not tonight?”

  “Don’t rush things.”

  “Maybe he’ll accept another offer in between.”

  “He won’t.”

  “How can you be so—”

  “Because I know how he thinks,” Bellweather insisted with a confident grin. “Jack intends to gather the offers, then he’ll be back at our door. We have time.”

  Early in the morning of day eight, Jack gave his watchers the slip. It did not appear intentional, certainly not planned, but a car whipped into his driveway at 5:05, Jack dashed out the front door and jumped in the passenger seat, and the car squealed away.

  The watchers strained to get the license number, but between the darkness, their drowsiness after another long dreary night, and the fact that the plate was splattered with mud, it was hopeless. The car was a late-model Mercury Sable, dull gray in color, assuredly not a hired limo, and thus presumably was driven by a friend or acquaintance of Jack’s.

  By the time the watch car idling around the corner received the order to give chase, any hope of catching up was futile.

  Floyd Thompson, the driver, turned to Jack and said, “Long time no see, Captain.”

  Jack smiled at him. “Four years, Floyd. What’ve you been up to?”

  “Same old, same old.”

  “How was Afghanistan?”

  “Is that a question?”

  Jack laughed. Fifteen years earlier he had served beside Floyd, back when Floyd was a newly promoted buck sergeant, E-5, and Jack was his commander. Now Floyd was an E-8, on the list for promotion to sergeant major, the highest enlisted rank in the Army. The first wisp of gray salted his temples, though he still looked as fit as he had at 23.

  “Ike and Danny can’t make it this time,” Floyd informed him. “Ike’s in Afghanistan, Danny’s doing Iraq.”

  “Some guys will do anything to get out of this.”

  Floyd smiled. “Miss it?” he asked with a quick glance at Jack. “I mean, the life.”

  “Which part? The early morning five-mile runs, sleeping on the ground, lousy pay? Frequent tours to countries I wouldn’t send my worst enemies to? Being shot at?” Jack paused, then smiled. “Sure, who wouldn’t?”

  Floyd laughed and they caught up on their lives and drove generally westward for two hours, eventually ending up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, at a small, obscure country cemetery on the outskirts of town. The morning was cool and blustery. A light drizzle was coming down. A small knot of people had already arrived and were milling around in the rain by the parking lot.

  Like Floyd, four of the men wore Army uniforms bedecked with ribbons and military merit badges and a long procession of time stripes on their sleeves. And two, like Jack, wore suits appropriate to their current status as former soldiers, now civilians.

  The men filed over and they all shook hands but said few words. Next they all marched solemnly to a gravesite where a woman, Selma Gaither, was standing, using the moment of solitude to share private thoughts with the man in the grave, her husband, Thomas Gaither, former staff sergeant and a former comrade of the men in the group.

  It was a ritual they adhered to every four years, coming together at Tom Gaither’s final resting place, a way to honor a fallen friend. Floyd shuffled behind the gravestone and managed to produce a few simple words, then started crying; he just managed to choke out a barely coherent amen. He and Tom had joined the Army together, a pair of stout defensive linemen at Salisbury High School looking for a new life. They had grown up on the same block, raised hell as teenagers, barely escaped high school, then gone off to war under a stint the Army called the Buddy Program.

  They all stood in an awkward silence another five minutes, each man remembering what scraps and remnants he could of serving beside Tom. The memories became dimmer with the passing years, though nobody cared to admit it. Two of the men owed their lives to Tom and both cried quietly but unashamedly.

  Finally, Jack led the procession back to their cars. They drove five miles in a caravan over twisty back roads to The Gut, a remote roadside eatery that had somehow become part of this little ritual. The Gut was little more than a shack, a shabby collection of cramped booths and chipped, linoleum-topped tables. Someone had called ahead and four tables had been jammed together and reserved for the party. Except Jack, the offspring of a military professional, the rest of the men came from hardscrabble backgrounds and were quite at home there.

  Jack sat at one end of the tables, Selma at the other. She also had grown up with Tom, had had her pigtails pulled by him in kindergarten, had flirted shamelessly and relentlessly with him throughout elementary school, had dated him continuously through high school, then broke it off when Tom left for his Army Basic training.

  Selma had deep roots in Allentown, her family having settled there a hundred years before. They were immensely prolific types and there was barely a block in the city without her kin. She had no intention of leaving her family and friends, of living the gypsy life of a military wife. The night before he left for boot camp, she and Tom had a loud, raucous fight. The first battle in their relationship, it was also the last, both swore resolutely to themselves when the brawl ended. That firm divorce lasted all of three days, before Selma hopped a train for Georgia and they were married, till death do they part, the day after Tom completed basic training.

  Selma was a large black woman, bighearted and fiercely independent. It was clear that Tom would be the only man in her life. They had produced two lovely children, Jeremy and Lisa, and raising them had occupied whatever loneliness Selma felt.

  A gargantuan breakfast was served—ten plates piled high with flatcakes, five dishes overloaded with greasy bacon and greasier grits, ten pots of stiff black coffee, and an assortment of local side orders. The Gut was no place for the health-conscious.

  Conversation flowed easily as the men caught up on their lives—who had gotten married, divorced, had children, and so forth. The men had all gone their separate ways, those who got out jumping into various professions, and those who stayed in, buffeted by the Army’s chronic wartime needs, bouncing through an assortment of assignments. But they had survived a war together. They had fought and bled and nearly died together. That bond was more special than a common college or fraternity brotherhood: it lasted a lifetime.

  “Remember the day it happened?” Floyd eventually asked, sipping his coffee and staring at Jack. It was time to get down to business. The table was loaded with empty dishes. A sullen waitress in the corner eyed the mounds of empty plates but made no move to retrieve them.

  “Like I could forget,” Jack answered, giving a look down the table at Selma, who quietly produced a resigned nod. She eased back in her chair, cupped her coffee in her hands, and settled in for the talk.

  Pete Robbins, two seats down, muttered, “Tell you what I remember most. There was a sandstorm like I never seen before or since. Stuff filled your ears, crawled up your nose, couldn’t see two feet.”

  “Yeah,” Willy Morton joined in, “the third day of the war. We had that big fight the day before, the one at that sand dune, remember? Still can’t believe we all made it through that fight.”

  Three or four men began nodding. Yep, they remembered.

  Floyd put down his coffee and leaned back in his chair. “And then Captain Wiley got ordered to move to the next village. They said by the radio emissions there had to be a big headquarters there. We was supposed to knock it out.”

  Selma, at the other end of the table, sipped from her coffee and patiently let the men ramble on. It was the same thing every time, the men recounting the day Tom died, going through the painful details as if it happened yesterday. She knew what it was, survivor’s guilt. They needed to return to that day and explain what happened because it was too late to change it. Well, nothing would change it, so she guessed talking it out had to suffice.

  Willy Morton, then the team medic now a doc
tor with a razor-sharp brain, performed most of the narration about that day, about Jack planning their assault, making the exhausted men rehearse and rehearse again, treating them all like packhorses, forcing everybody to haul a triple load of ammunition and six canteens of water. By the time the captain had finished adding more of this and a lot more of that—extra claymore mines, extra AT-4 rocket launchers, and so forth and so on—each man was hauling well over a hundred pounds through the hot desert. Jack had seemed to have a premonition, Willy explained, but nobody objected or complained.

  Yeah, that’s right, Walter Guidon chirped in. A crusty, foul-mouthed Cajun, he’d been with Jack in the Panama invasion, too, and quickly recounted a similar incident there when Jack had a hunch—a seer’s eye, he called it—and changed the plan at the last minute. Good thing, he said. The old plan would’ve gotten them all butchered.

  Then Willy took over the story again. A furious sandstorm hit and left them all blinded as they moved in for the attack. Selma heard again how Jack made them all lash one another together with a piece of rope, how Jack led the team like a staggering mule train through the driving sand straight to the objective, and how the sand obscured what an intelligence catastrophe they were walking into.

  It was a headquarters for sure, but left out of their briefing was that it was guarded and protected by nearly three hundred Iraqi soldiers, outnumbering Jack’s ten-man team by thirty to one.

  Evan Johnson, the heavy weapons man, picked it up at that point. A simple southern country boy with a flair for homespun phrases, after describing what a big, nasty surprise it was, he said it was like sticking your fist in an “uptight hornet’s nest.” Four years before, Evan had used the metaphor of sticking your fist in a “big pool of bone-starved piranhas”; the reunion before that, like landing in a pit of “seriously annoyed snapping turtles.”

  Selma vaguely wondered what it would be in another four years.

  But before they knew it, the attackers were the defenders, surrounded and, as a result of the blinding sandstorm, unable to receive air support, or helicopters, or artillery, or even reinforcements. The battle raged for six hairy hours. Both sides pounded away with enthusiasm. Had Jack not ordered every man to carry triple the normal ammunition load, they would’ve been slaughtered after only an hour or two.

  Like Selma, Jack sat quietly and allowed the men to recount the horrors of a day when by all reason they all should’ve been killed.

  There was a reason for the prolonged story, though, and at the appropriate point the others fell silent and allowed Floyd to pick up the thread. He and Tom had been boyhood friends, after all; it was by now part of the tradition that he got to narrate the sad ending.

  The battle had raged over five hours by the time Floyd weighed in with considerable drama. The team now was desperately huddled inside two small buildings on the far edge of the village. They were little more than huts, but the walls were thick mud that swallowed whatever the Iraqis shot. The noise of bullets and explosions had long since grown monotonous. Evan and Willy were wounded, barely conscious; the tourniquets Jack had tied were all that kept them alive. A few others had been nicked and bruised, but nothing too severe. Ammunition was now precariously low, a few rounds, then they’d be throwing rocks and spitting at the Iraqis; Jack had long since given the order to fire only at the sure targets. Iraqi bodies littered the ground around the two buildings, including two large piles of corpses where the enemy had twice tried to outflank Jack’s position and rushed straight into lethal blasts from the claymore mines he had added to their packing list.

  The only hope was to collect some of the Iraqi weapons from the dead in the large stacks. After telling the others to give him cover, Jack made a mad dash out the door, dodging a hailstorm of bullets and rushing to the piles of bodies, using the corpses for cover as he stripped their weapons and whatever ammunition he could grab.

  Tom made a decision to join him. He dove out a side window, rolled a few times, then stood and sprinted for the second pile, where Jack was hunkered down, gripping a stack of weapons and ammunition. About ten yards from Jack, he went tumbling through the air and landed just short of the pile of bodies.

  From Jack’s face, Floyd said, they knew Tom was hurt, and that it was real bad. Jack threw Tom over one shoulder, hauled the weapons and ammunition with his free arm, and sprinted for the building.

  He laid Tom on the ground, distributed the Iraqi guns and bullets, then returned to kneel beside the fallen man. Tom hollered at him to ignore his wounds and get back to fighting. Jack instead yelled for Floyd to come over and didn’t need to explain why. There was nothing to be done; Tom only had minutes left.

  He began talking about Selma and the kids. He said Selma had given his life meaning and happiness, and he swore he wouldn’t change a minute of it. He was sad he was dying, but happy he and Selma had created two lives, Jeremy and Lisa.

  By the time Floyd finished, all the men were sniffling and acknowledging how Tom’s sacrifice had saved them all. He was a certified hero, they all agreed.

  And it was all a big lie. The truth was that after five hours of unrelenting fire, Tom had snapped. Whatever it was—the direness of the situation, the ammunition dilemma, the hopelessness of Jack’s desperate effort to collect guns and ammunition—he just seemed to outrun his mental tether. When Jack made the dash out the front and drew all the Iraqi fire, Tom made a foolhardy sprint out the back, hoping to use the distraction and the cover of the sandstorm to make his escape.

  He was cut in half by an angry hail of bullets before he got twenty feet. There had been no final words. No dramatic farewell, no last thoughts about Selma and the kids. They collected Tom’s bullet-riddled corpse after the fight ended.

  At the time, the mood of the team was fury at Tom for trying to run out on them that way. But Jack gathered them all together and made them swear a solemn vow; Tom had a wife and kids, after all. Sure, in a moment of weakness he might’ve tried to escape, but they wouldn’t run out on him. They’d been through lots of tough fights and scrapes together. They wouldn’t let one moment of cowardice be his shameful legacy.

  Now, after all these years, a number of the men had actually convinced themselves that Tom’s final act of heroism was a stone-cold fact, absolutely the way it happened. Selma thanked them for coming and for honoring the memory of her husband, then slowly the group began to break up and go their separate ways.

  Finally, it was Selma’s turn and she asked Jack to walk her to the parking lot and see her off.

  Outside, she took his arm and said, “Strange how that tale changes every four years.”

  “Memory is a funny thing.”

  “Yep. Last time, they all swore Tom went out the door for the weapons first. They said you followed him.” She was looking at Jack’s face with her eyes narrowed.

  “They’re getting older, Selma. Another four years and Tom will be wearing a blue cape, rushing the main Iraqi position, and pulling the weapons out of their living hands. How are the kids?” Jack asked, quickly changing the subject.

  “Fine. Jeremy made the basketball team at Lafayette College.”

  “I heard. He called me after the cut. And Lisa?”

  “Got all her applications in. Straight A’s, that girl.”

  “Gets it from her mother.”

  “Who you kiddin’?” They both chuckled and continued walking in silence to the car. Selma had barely made it out of high school; her children would be the first of her family to graduate from college, much less such fine colleges. Lisa was hoping desperately for Princeton, Jack’s alma mater. She was smart, athletically gifted, popular, and best of all, a minority. The admissions people were making promising noises. Jack opened Selma’s door, but before she got in, she gave him a strong hug. “The kids and I thank you. Without that fund, I don’t know if they’d of got this chance at college. It means more than anything, Jack.”

  “They all threw in some money to get the fund started.”

  “Uh-huh
.” Maybe it was true, maybe everybody threw a little cash into the Gaither kids’ college kettle, but Selma was not the gullible sort. At best the team might’ve been able to pinch together a few thousand dollars. They were all soldiers back then, living paycheck to paycheck, barely able to afford their car payments. And maybe, as Jack always swore up and down, his investment of that hoard might’ve fallen into a gold mine and multiplied a few times—but no way did he grow a few thousand dollars into half a million, enough for both kids to go to any college in the country, without a second thought to the cost.

  “You’re a fine man, Jack Wiley. When are you gonna find a fine woman? The kids are always askin’ when Uncle Jack’s gonna settle down.”

  Jack laughed. “You have a sister?”

  “Yeah. A real uptight bitch. She’s too old for you. Already been married and divorced three times, anyways. Can’t hold a man.”

  Jack smiled. “Can I have her number?”

  6

  Bellweather was right. It was nearly five in the evening the next day when Jack called. Walters’s assistant, Alice, unfamiliar with his name, swore up and down her boss was out of the office and in any event was too busy to speak with him. But Jack loudly insisted that she interrupt whatever her boss was doing and mention his name.

  Walters at that moment had a putter clenched in his sweaty palms, having just lined up a shot, when his cell phone rattled. He was on the back nine of the Army Navy Country Club, hosting two admirals and a high-level assistant secretary of acquisition from the Pentagon. A shipbuilding company down in Pascagoula, owned by CG, was a year late and now two hundred million and counting in cost overruns on a pair of Navy destroyers. Walters was using the occasion to talk them out of a full-blown audit, doing it the usual way, hinting at the job openings that were expected to come open right about the time the three men were in the window for retirement.

  He blew the putt, an easy five-footer, threw down the putter, cursed, and jerked the phone off his belt. “What?” he yelled, wishing he could strangle the caller.